Eric opened the meeting inviting our guests to introduce themselves. Therefore, we met Felix, Veronica from Venezuela, Darío from Dominican Republic, Elena and Lee from Korea. The last two names are not real names but easier for us to remember than the real Korean names of their bearers.

Names were very important in our last club meeting: Eric had thoroughly looked for the meaning and popular bearers of the names of all the participants in the meeting. We learnt popularity statistics and that most of us share the Biblical origin of our names.

We all loved how members who recently joined our club (Maria Mirat, Christian, Maravillas, Juliet and Ana), played a very important role in the first part of the meeting.

During the introduction of her role as Timekeeper, Maria Mirat made us remember the story of the “Men in Grey” from the novel “Momo” by Michael Ende. Those “Men in Grey” represented the “Time Saving Bank” and promoted the idea of time saving.
Christian, our Grammarian, chose “Impeccable” as the Word of the Day. And he confessed that he had just learned that the Spanish word was very similar.

Just before the prepared speeches, Maravillas recommended us to see a film: “The good lie”, in a longer than usual, but very interesting Thought of the day.

Two prepared speeches were Icebreakers. The Icebreaker is the first speech in the Competent Communication Manual, the first milestone for every member in her Toastmasters journey.

Juliet, the first speaker, remembered with emotion, her first working experiences in the city of Jos (Nigeria). She taught us how we can influence and touch lives with something small and trivial: Chocolate!!

The second prepared speech of the meeting was Ana’s Icebreaker. With “the pets of my life”, she presented the different stages of her life, her family, the period of time she spent in the US… and how animals have always had a prominent role.

Masha is nearly Competent Communicator!! She delivered her 8th speech on last Wednesday. With her magnificent body language, vocal variety and all the visual aids she was requested to use to reach the objectives of her project, we learned “The true story of Matryoshka”. According to Masha, originally Russian Matryoshkas consisted on 7 figures. Each one was painted in a certain rainbow colour, from red to violet, in the same way that the 7 chakras or 7 life force-energies in yogi tradition have a corresponding colour.

When speakers are finished, evaluators take their turn:

• Both Teresa and Raquel focused on the opportunity that new members give the rest of us to know them better with their Icebreakers.
• Jim evaluated Masha and he pointed out that “as always, it is a pleasure to listen to you”.

Julian, the Table Topic Master, gave us the opportunity to travel through time (as Rosa and David did), and through space, because Elena flied over Ibiza. During Table Topics Evaluation, Nacho focused on the great Rosa´s performance and that Elena “gave us more than a short speech of a minute”.

Before the meeting is finished, our supporting roles (Grammarian and Timekeeper) gave their reports:

• According to Christian, paying 0.10 € for each filler word is always something to celebrate, as we are helping others with the money we get.
• Maria divided us in three groups: the frugal, the moderate and the talkative ones, depending on how long we talked.

General evaluator is always the last role of each meeting. Jane, Gift of God, as her name means, pointed out that we had struggled against noise and heat during the meeting. Something that the new Club Committee has to face for future sessions, next one on 17th of June.

Written by Raquel.